Doings at Carpenter's Woods

I hate to let the Blackburnian slip out of the top position in this blog but life, and migration, moves on. And today was the day the Wood Thrushes returned to Carpenter's Woods in Philadelphia. I went looking for warblers and other neo-tropical migrants since warm weather seems to have dumped them in huge quantities throughout Pennsylvania over the last few days.

But no warblers today. That's okay though. Sometimes there are so many new birds it's hard to appreciate any of them, sort of like trying to see Rome in a day. It's hard to believe that Carpenter's Woods is ever quiet. A major road one side, renegade leaf blowers seeming to run non-stop on all other sides. Sometimes I'm surprised I can hear anything there. But there were moments today when it was quiet and all I could hear was the rich, almost orchestral song of the newly arrived Wood Thrush.

The thrushes often sound like flutes, which do indeed have a rich sound. But it almost seems to be cheating Wood Thrushes to say that they just sound like one instrument. They are so rich I think it's better to liken them to an orchestra.

When I lived in San Francisco many, many years ago there was always someone down near Ghirardelli Square and Fishermsn's Wharf advertised as something like a one-man band. A walking box with a person inside that spat out just about every sound you can think of. At least that's my recollection. Of course there is an avian equivalent - the Gray Catbird. Many of them have also been back for a few days, yackety-yack, yackety-yack. Still it's nice to see them back. Soon they'll be in our own backyard, scarfing down the blueberries.

Some readers may remember my Wood Duck watercolor of just a month or so ago. I've not done anything that detailed since. And in the work at top I've really gone quite far afield. But I really do prefer liveliness, a sense of life, to something that looks more like a well-rendered photograph.

Today along with the Wood Thrush I saw an American Robin bathing in the small stream, then raising his wings up and shaking off the water. I also saw a familiar spring sight, a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher picking apart a Tent Caterpillar 'nest' for nesting materials. I did quick sketches of all of these today. They are not great and I'm not going to show them.

But the very act of trying to sketch these scenes makes it easier to do a painting based on them. I've taken the first step. The other steps are easier. So this is a felt tip pen sketch of a composite of thrush, robin and gnatcatcher. I think it captures at least some of the excitement of being out today. I hope Eric Ennion would commend me.

Blizzard Bread

Well I don't think anyone is making any official estimates yet but my guess is that at least in our part of Philadelphia we've gotten about 48 inches of snow over the last 5 days. Today we both stayed home from work due to 'blizzard warnings.' I'm not sure I've ever even seen a blizzard warning in my 25+ years here. Blizzards occur in Chicago, where I used to live, or Ithaca, where I also used to live, but not in Philadelphia. I've forgotten what snow and winter really are due to my 25 years here.

But no more. This is real snow!

I don't think I've ever shown food on this blog before, and unless you can squeeze the wild yeasts of sourdough bread into the nature category food isn't really art, birds or nature. Sourdough needs to be fed in order to be used for baking. So you can't just say: hey I'll make some sourdough bread today! You need to feed your starter for a day or two.

I had been doing that and it was ready today. And I was home all day. So time to make some sourdough bread. In this case I decided to make foccaccia, loosely based on the recipe in my bible of sourdough baking, "Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery." The day many years ago when I decided to buy that book and learn to make sourdough bread was a life-changing experience. It took about 2 weeks to nurture my first starter so that it was strong enough to make bread. That was probably 10 years ago or so. Since then every winter is the time for sourdough bread.

But today I wanted to do something special: not just bread but foccaccia. Our cupboards are a bit bare so smoked turkey replaced anchovies, and cheddar cheese replaced Parmesan. Leftover broccoli raab, the last of some oil-cured olives and a lot of sesame seeds topped it off. A beautiful bread for the day of a blizzard.

Earlier in the day I worked on some dunlin sketches. I did live field sketches of these same birds at Bringantine NWR last October. But I had tremendous trouble with the slant of the bill in those sketches. Today I attempted to get a better sense of the bill and their overall structure. This is an exercise in learning as much as it is in art. Finally I turned to books by Charles Tunnicliffe, Eric Ennion and Roger Tory Peterson so see how the experts handled dunlins.

Finally a few photos of the snow. Just last weekend I posted a photo of our back yard and the snow on the lawn chair. Now the snow on the chair is almost twice as high and you almost can't see the chair!

Needless to say our birds are having a very hard time. The strong wind and snow instantly cover any food put on the ground and the feeders only hold so many birds. Hopefully tomorrow will bring better weather for the birds.

As for us I'm sure it's going to be one long, slow drive into work, if I can find the car in the snow.

Wood Warblers End the Year

I had thought that I might move on to sparrows after rinishing my duck sketches and paintings. But we haven't seen much of anything other than House Sparrows and I don't really have too many sparrow photos.

I do have a lot of wood warbler photos though, especially the friendly Canada Warblers that we see at Shenandoah National Park each spring. So it seemed appropriate to end the year and the beginning of the sparse gray season of winter with the jewel-like warblers.

This drawing doesn't show any color since it's in pencil. Even if I did it in color you wouldn't see much since the bright yellow is on the underside and face. It contrasts with the blue-gray of the birds upper side. But I hope to do other drawings that show the underside and more of the face. Eventually I hope to do some watercolors.

This drawing gets much more involved with individual feathers than I'm comfortable with. But I hope that by drawing them I'll learn more about them and eventually be able to do a shorthand version of them. Some people take pleasure in rendering each feather or feather tract. I don't, at lesat not all that much. But sometimes you really need to understand the structure of a bird before you can portray it faithfully in a more abbreviated manner.

I was looking at Eric Ennion's 'The Living Birds of Eric Ennion' this morning. In it he showed some studies of a dead bird. The accompanying quote said that the artist needed to take every opportunity to study dead birds if he wants to accurately portray live ones. I think he meant by this that you can see structural details that you otherwise couldn't. Sometimes photos offer the same opportunity, perhaps like learning multiplication tables. It's a bit like rote learning. But that learning should help you to portray live birds in all their dynamic glory.

Shorebirds in Flight

Even John Busby in his wonderful book about drawing birds from life, 'Drawing Birds', concedes that photography has allowed artists to see things that they haven't seen so well before. I think birds in flight is one of these. Though even there you can find examples, and he does in his book on Eric Ennion, of how an accomplished artists can still do a better job with his naked eye. There is a thrill in capturing movement actually seen firsthand that is not matched in working from photos.

All of which just leads up to the obvious: the watercolor pencil and watercolor sketch above is based on a photo I took at Heislerville WMA in April, 2009. Shorebirds are just not that familiar to my wife and myself, though they could be if we'd drag ourselves out of Philadelphia and the fewer than 100 miles over to Cape May more often. Nonetheless when we do get to see shorebirds it is a great experience. They are subtly beautiful birds in themselves but their story of lengthy migrations and the movements of whole flocks at a time all add up to make them one of our favorite bird types.

So when I got some decent photos I couldn't resist trying to make some sort of art from them. I'm recovering from a truly horrible virus of some sort and so this is the first new work in a week or so. I thought I'd use watercolor pencils for my first attempt. I think this was a combination of just wanting to continue to explore watercolor pencils and the added detail that they can bring to a painting. Because they begin as lines they are much easier to control than a brush, at least for anyone not accomplished in watercolor.

Knowing that I was going to try to be drawing birds in very confusing postures due to being caught at a moment in time by the camera I wanted all the help I could get. So drawing seemed a good idea. And I think it worked for getting some of the shapes.

BUT the still water has again defeated me. I tried to render it in watercolor pencil, then wash. When that looked bad I abandoned my vow not to go back into watercolor pencil when it was still wet and eventually went into it with abandon. Not much help. Finally, as a last ditch attempt, I went to straight watercolor. I didn't totally kill the surface as I did in the Greater Yellowlegs skecth of a week or two ago. But that's about it.

So there's still this dilemma with me and watercolor pencils. How in the world do you make a convincing area of large still water? I'm sure I'll continue to experiment. I'm obviously disappointed with the background and so I thought about just not posting this. But I am happy with getting some sense of the Short-billed Dowtchers and Dunlins in flight though, so I decided to post it for that reason. Shorebirds in flight are mighty impressive.

Flying Hiccup Revisited

Almost a year ago a Ruby-Crowned Kinglet appeared in our backyard. He was a very welcome visitor and I wanted to sketch him. But as with all Ruby-Crowned or Golden-Crowned Kinglets I've seen he just wouldn't sit still long enough for me to do so.



I wrote a post on this in late February of 2008. When I've seen kinglets close up, i.e. so close I don't need my binoculars, they always looked like ping-pong balls with wings. Perfectly round. But also constantly in motion. So I decided that I really shouldn't call them ping-pong balls. That perfect sphericality implies solidity and stasis. That certainly doesn't describe kinglets. Then 'Flying Hiccup' popped into my head. That sounded right. Kinglets are constantly exploding with movement, just like an uncontrollable hiccup.

The two photos above show a Ruby-Crowned Kinglet from this winter. I'm not sure if it's the same one that was here last year but it is possible. My guess is that it's even probable, but that's just an uneducated guess. What is striking about the photos is how they show that ping-pong ball sphericality.

I've been trying to sketch this kinglet from life over the last few weeks. I've not been successful. But one of the first things that has struck me is the sleek profile of his upper torso. The head moves gradually and sleekly into the mantle and back, much like a Red-Eyed Vireo. This was a great surprise. I expected Roly-Poly. I found Sleek!



The sketch above shows three attempts to capture that sleekness (along with two juncos, who also didn't sit still for long). I think I may have noticed this sleekness due to my current reading: 'Lars Jonsson's Birds.' This book is incredible! Some people have said that Jonsson is the best living bird artist and he has to be one of the best. He does a spectacular job of melding detailed observation with artistic rendering and sensibility. I may write more about him at another time and have published a review of this book at Amazon.

Jonsson emphasizes close observation from life, both in his writing and in his art. And he says he just draws what he sees. If the bird leaves before he finishes what he was drawing he doesn't rely on past knowledge to finish off the sketch. He just stops drawing, making sure that anything he puts down in a sketch is just what he actually saw. Eric Ennion's advice is similar but stronger: "STOP", he says when the bird has moved or flown. Don't use your visual memory of it, at least not when you're making sketches. Only use sketches for real, observed portrayal.

In trying that method today I of course didn't get far before the kinglet flew. In fact I wrote this post a week ago and have held off on publishing it in the hopes of including a better sketch. No such luck though the kinglet has been here for a few minutes most days. The one thing I kept seeing was the sleek line from head to back. That is what I have tried to emphasize in the sketch above. It's also what I look for each time I see him. One day I'll finally do a decent sketch.

I first wrote about sketching kinglets even before my post of a year ago. I think that it's been at least 18 months now that I've talked about trying to sketch them. Like mastering watercolor it has been a difficult task. But it is a worthy one and one I'm confident I'll succeed at eventually. In the meantime the work of Lars Jonsson has been a great example of the possibility of accomplishing such goals.

Scribbling Like Mad, Birding Like Mad

I'm sorry to say that no artwork accompanies this post, not unless our recent visitor the Ruby-Crowned Kinglet makes another visit and I can make a quick sketch. So this is more or less a place-holder post. I won't go so far as to say it's 'filler.'

I've done little artwork recently partially due to the holiday season but also due to the number of bird counts that I take part in during January. Last week was the Christmas Bird Count at the Schuylkill Center For Environmental Education in Philadelphia, PA. Tomorrow is the Philadelphia Mid-Winter Bird Census organized by Keith Russell. Both take up a good portion of the day, especially the Mid-winter census.

I take part in them both because I like to bird but also because it's fascinating finding out what birds live in an area in the winter. Almost all of the migrants are gone and just the hardy winter residents remain. Most people would be shocked to see how many different species of birds remain around in the winter time. Keith's reports on Philadelphia show that 92 species were seen last year. The results can be seen in this PDF. While many people are shocked to see even Robins in winter in the northern U.S., especially in the cities, the Mid-Winter Bird Census found almost 100 last year in a large northern city! That continues to amaze me.

So I've been busy and will be busy birding, perhaps not madly, but certainly a lot.

I've also been working my way through the Winslow Homer book that I mentioned in another post as well as John Busby's older book on the English artist, 'The Living Birds of Eric Ennion.' It's been a pleasure to read and view. The last section is on sketching birds. It talks about both the need to constantly be drawing from life, AND the necessity of editing and interpreting. As John Busby says: 'Interpretation requires knowledge of essentials, and the process of distillation is the refining of everything to an overriding pictorial sense of rightness. Without these qualities I doubt whether any picture can be called a work of art.'

This emphasizes what I've said in recent posts: the need to really know birds by drawing them from life. The very last page says this: 'Puffins drawn at sea--by no means easy if you stop to think first! I have vivid memories of tours of the Farnes, with Eric drawing like mad while everyone else struggled with cameras. I wonder who saw the most?'

So you need to 'draw like mad' probably without thinking in order to come to a type of knowledge that understands the essentials of a bird. It is a weird combination of thoughtlessness and the very deepest consciousness. That coupled with an 'overriding sense of pictorial rightness' leads to great bird art.